Your Girl’s Confidence by MRS. C. C. LEWIS

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 18, 1915

Your Girl’s Confidence

By MRS. C. C. LEWIS

MRS. C. C. LEWIS

VALUE your little girl’s confidence, and she will value yours when she is older. I have been so sorry for the girls who are growing up without being “mothered,” and for the mothers whose hearts ache for the confidence of their girls, that I have long desired to say something to help them. Mothers often think, “When Nellie is older, I will spend more time instructing her,” not realizing that when she gets ready to give her instruction, Nellie will have formed so many congenial companions she will not feel any particular need of her mother’s counsel.

The time to win the child is when she comes with some matter that to you may seem trivial, but which is big with importance in her mind. No matter what the point of contact may be, keep in touch with her, and bide your time. Some day she will want to have a little heart-to-heart talk with some one, and she will at once think of mother, because she is always interested in everything little girls want to tell her.

I found a story in the Ladies’ Home Journal, not long ago, that presents this subject in its true light. I wish the lesson would burn its way into the heart of every mother. The story is told by Mrs. Pelham, and is as follows:—

“Why didn’t she come to tell me herself?” said Mrs. Holden, in so hurt a tone that I felt sorry for her. “I’m her mother.”

“Didn’t she come?” I asked.

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Holden. “Do you suppose that if she had I should have needed to come to you to hear that she is engaged? I think it is most unkind of a girl, to say the least, to go to another woman with her love affairs before she comes to her own mother. It is as if she didn’t trust me.”

“Oh, I’m sure it isn’t that,” I said. “Lucile adores you. What she said to me was: ‘Mrs. Pelham, I need advice. Mother’s too busy to be bothered. Will you help me?’ Of course I said I would gladly.”

“She could have come again,” said Mrs. Holden.

“I shook my head. ‘Confidences are sensitive plants,’ I said. ‘They wither at the first unfriendly touch.’”

“She shouldn’t have chosen just the moment when she knew I was in a hurry,” said Mrs. Holden.

“She didn’t choose,” I argued. “You don’t understand, Mrs. Holden. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, knowing that you didn’t like the Lowries. Lucile had probably been trying to find courage to tell you from the moment that George proposed. It always takes time for a girl to screw herself up to the telling point in a case like that; and when she’s there, she just runs off to you with her news without even thinking of what you may be doing at the time. If you won’t hear her, she has to begin screwing up all over again. And, as often as not, she won’t. She just hurries away to some one else who she knows will be sympathetic, as Lucile came to me.’

“That’s a simple way to excuse her,” said Mrs. Holden. “But I say that if a girl has anything to tell her mother, it’s the girl’s business to see that it is told. If it worked your way a mother would have to be ready to stop and listen to anything her daughter had to say, day or night, year in year out, for fear of missing the important thing.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “she would. There is no way of compromising for time, if you really want your daughter’s confidence. That’s why most mothers don’t have it; not because they don’t care about it, but because they don’t realize that to get it you must be ready for it always, and take it when it comes.”

“And let your work suffer, I suppose, even if it is work you are doing for them—as it usually is,” said Mrs. Holden with a shade of disapproval. “I thought you were always saying that a woman who hoped to accomplish anything important must never let outside things interfere with the work in hand.”

“Those cookies you made for the fair were good as could be,” I said. “I should like to have the recipe myself. But they weren’t exactly what I should call ‘important.’”

“They might have been,” insisted Mrs. Holden. “It’s the principle of the thing I’m talking about.”

“Long ago I discovered that whenever a person is on the wrong side of an argument and wants to stay there, he always says that it is not the special case, but the principle of the thing he is fighting for. ‘Mrs. Holden,’ said I, ‘may I tell you a story about “the principle of the thing”?’”

Mrs. Holden opened her hand bag and took out her crochet needle and some Irish lace that she was making. “Surely. Tell me,” she said.

“To tell a story to a woman who is embroidering is one thing—it gives the story-teller the pleasant assurance of silence. But to tell a story to a woman who is crocheting Irish edging is another thing—there is little assurance of attention from a listener who is counting ten, and seven, and six (or is it five?) for the loop. But I was not easily discouraged.

“A long time ago,” I began, “I went to visit a cousin in a lazy little village at the seashore, where nobody ever seemed to be in a hurry for anything. It was a blistering hot day, not a breath of air stirring, nor anything else that didn’t need to. I was sitting on the porch, reading, when the ice wagon came along.

“‘Morning,’ said the iceman.

“‘Warm day,’ said I.

“‘Hot, I should call it,’ said he, taking out a block of ice and weighing it. ‘That’s why I’m late. Everybody along the line wants extra ice today.’”

“‘Ice does seem about the most important thing in the world in this weather,’ I started to say, but stopped, hearing the siren whistle that meant a fire in the village. ‘Where’s that?’ I asked him.”

“‘The ice horses pricked up their ears, the iceman squared his shoulders, dropped his tongs and his ice, unhitched the horses, mounted one of them and rode away in less time than it takes to tell the story.

“‘In about ten minutes he was back. “False alarm,” he said unperturbedly, hitching up his horses again and picking up the block of ice that lay melting in the hot street. “Hard on the ice on a day like this, but my horses draw the fire engine, and I guess my customers ’u’d rather be a little short of ice and have me answer twenty false alarms than be a minute late when a real fire comes.”’”

“‘Four, five,’ Mrs. Holden counted, and turned her lace before she looked up. ‘I suppose you are going to draw a moral from that interesting story,’ she said.

“‘I’m,’ said I. ‘The moral’s so obvious that I should be ashamed to tell it to anybody who wasn’t counting stitches. It is just this: There are a lot of things that seem important under certain conditions; some when it is hot, some when it is cold. And then there are a few, like fire, that are important under all conditions, because you never can tell, until you have attended to them, just what they are going to amount to. Your children’s confidences are a sort of fire; you’ve got to decide pretty quickly when the call comes whether you want to answer—even though it may well be a false alarm—or whether you will run the chance of having something burn to ashes: a thought, or a wish, or a story. That’s all.’”

“‘It’s a good story,’ said Mrs. Holden. ‘I’ll remember it and tell it myself sometime. But just the same, my dear Mrs. Pelham, you’ll find out when Lisbeth grows up that it is a great deal easier to argue these things out for other people’s

children than to settle them for your own. You just wait.’”

“‘Why should I wait?’ I asked.

“‘Lisbeth is only nine now. You don’t have to worry about her confidences yet.’ Mrs. Holden sighed.

“‘That’s just where you make your mistake,’ I told her. ‘Now is the very time to worry about them, or rather to be sure of them. Do you think that if this week had been the first time you were too busy for Lucile, she would have come to me? Indeed not; you lost her years ago. Most of the misunderstandings between mothers and daughters begin before mothers fairly realize that their daughters understand enough to misunderstand anything. Little girls of nine wouldn’t be deserted as they are if mothers knew how much it meant to girls of that age.’”

“‘Whatever do you mean—“deserted”?’ said Mrs. Holden. ‘You use such awful-sounding words! I’m sure there’s not a little girl in Rangeley that doesn’t have the best of care.’”

“‘Three meals a day, a bath, and clean clothes,’ I said without sarcasm. ‘That’s all quite true. And that’s a lot. Most of the world’s children don’t have so much as that. I doubt if I should have noticed what was missing if Miss Loomis hadn’t spoken to me about it.’”

“‘Miss Loomis? You mean the fourth-grade teacher at the school?’”

“‘It was at the Thanksgiving celebration at the school. The assembly room was full of eager, interested mothers, and I remarked upon the number. “Not one of my mothers is here,” Miss Loomis said, “They never come.”’”

“‘What do you mean?’ I asked her, and she answered: ‘Mothers come to school when the children are in kindergarten and in the first grade. It is such a pretty sight to watch the little tots! Mothers love it. And they come again when the girls are in the seventh grade to be sure that they’ll get into the eighth, and when they are in the eighth, to be sure they will graduate. But we are neither the beginning nor the end. We’re just the awkward age; we don’t need anybody to lead us by the hand; we’re not ready to walk arm in arm; so they don’t think we matter. Oh, if mothers only knew!’”

“‘Mrs. Holden had put down her lace and was listening. I could see where her thoughts were harking back. “What did Miss Loomis mean,” she asked, “by saying ‘if mothers only knew’?”’”

“‘She meant,’ I said, as seriously as I had ever said anything, ‘that this was the way mothers lost the chance to know their daughters. Fractions are not fun to watch, it’s true, and the middle grades are not the end of anything in education. But the years that are spent in them are the beginning of a great deal of knowledge and experience in a young girl’s life, every bit of which a mother ought to share. We don’t realize that, most of us. We know that the little bodies are growing; we can’t help knowing that, when the dresses which we expected to last all winter are suddenly above the knees; when the stockings don’t reach, and the coat sleeves leave the wrists all bare. “How they do shoot up!” we say, and hurry to the shop to buy more clothes, or sit down at the machine to make them. But we can’t see their little brains develop, particularly if they are silent and shy, as most little girls are just then.

“‘So we calmly take it for granted that all their young ideas fit as well as ever and don’t need attention, and sit down to bathe the baby. When we finish their clothes, we kiss them good-by, with the sense of doing our highest duty. Do you know I am beginning to think that we take the baby’s bath altogether too seriously nowadays. Anybody with common sense and an hour’s training can bathe a baby just as well as a baby’s mother can. It is a lovely and a loving, tender thing to do. Of course we want to do it for our own delight. And of course we should do it unless there is something more important that requires our attention. But if there isn’t time for baby’s bath and the confidences of the little girl of nine, it is better to let some one else bathe the baby.’”

“‘Why, Lisbeth’s just boiling over with doubts and with discoveries that nobody can help her through except myself. And she is no different from other girls! Of course if she didn’t have me to come to, she would go to some one else, some other girl of her own age, most likely, or a little older. You know what that means; we all know, when we stop to think about it, only we don’t stop often enough or soon enough.’”

“‘Or soon enough,’ said Mrs. Holden, echoing my words. ‘I guess I’m lucky, after all, that Lucile had you to come to. It’s a pretty complicated business, this bringing up a girl.’”

“‘Rather,’ I sighed.

“‘Do you make this Irish edge?’ asked Mrs. Holden.

“‘I shook my head. “I can’t stop talking long enough to count straight,” I said.’”

“‘Then keep this for Lisbeth,’ she said, folding up the lace and handing it to me. ‘She’ll need a new dress if she is going to be flower girl at Lucile’s wedding; and if you’ve been doing the talking I should have done to my own daughter all these years, you’ve spent at least as much time and energy on her as I’ve spent on this lace—

“‘And,’ she added, ‘to rather better advantage, too, I am beginning to see!’”